A fascinating look at a revival of African Indigenous Spirituality and a unique African spiritual institution.
by Márk Nemes
The latest installment in Cambridge University Press’ “Elements in New Religious Movements” series introduces a South African organization that prefers to be called, in its own terms, a “spiritual institution”: The Revelation Spiritual Home (TRSH, for short). In “The Revelation Spiritual Home: The Revival of African Indigenous Spiritiality” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025), authors Massimo Introvigne and Rosita Šorytė dive deep into the TRSH cosmos through immersive ethnographic fieldwork, examining everything from ritual choreography and cosmological self-narration to the group’s sartorial flair and its place in South Africa’s spiritual marketplace.
The book opens with a bold narrative gambit: before the reader meets the authors, they meet the movement’s charismatic leader, IMboni uZwi-Lezwe Radebe (also known as Dr. Samuel Radebe). He is portrayed while, on January 15, 2023, at TRSH’s Johannesburg spiritual center, he issued a clarion call for Africa to reclaim its ancestral spiritual heritage—what he terms African Indigenous Spirituality (AIS). This declaration is part of TRSH’s broader mission to scrub away centuries of colonial residue, reviving an authentic African spiritual grammar by purging it of what they see as Christian and Islamic syncretic distortions.
The book unfolds like a travelogue, inviting readers to tag along with the authors as they navigate TRSH’s spiritual terrain. This narrative style offers a sense of immediacy and intimacy, as if one were peeking over the authors’ shoulders during fieldwork. The text is organized into five thematic chapters: the notion of African Indigenous Spirituality and its relationship with African Initiated Churches (AICs); TRSH’s emergence within this religious ecosystem; the conceptual architecture of AIS vis-à-vis religion and spiritual pluralism; TRSH’s organizational anatomy; and finally, the public reception of TRSH, including its skirmishes with local anti-cult crusaders.
Introvigne and Šorytė engage critically with existing scholarship on African spirituality and emergent religiosities, highlighting the pitfalls of Eurocentric taxonomies. They argue—persuasively—that the term “neopaganism” is ill-suited to describe the AIS revival. Instead, drawing on the insights of scholars such as Kizito Chinedu Nweke and Ikenna Paschal Okpaleke, they propose a more nuanced heuristic: AIS as a “specific form of mundane-transcendent relationship of African origin” (p. 4). It’s a definition that resists reduction and rewards reflection.
The book offers a rich tapestry of AICs, including Isaiah Shembe’s Ibandla lamaNazaretha, the Kimbanguists, Kimpa Vita’s Antonianism, and earlier AIS organizations centered on figures such as Maphithini Thusi and the idiosyncratic Credo Mutwa.
These are contextualized within TRSH’s historiosophical framework. Particularly compelling is the conceptual dyad of “camouflage” and “appropriation”: the former refers to spiritual practices hidden within dominant religious forms for survival, while the latter involves recontextualizing borrowed elements to serve indigenous meanings. Western scholars familiar with Pagan Studies will find these ideas strikingly resonant.
Chapter 2 sketches the life of TRSH’s founder, Samuel Radebe, tracing pivotal moments: the physical toll of childhood visions, the sting of racial prejudice within the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, and a transformative vision in 2006 that led to the founding of TRSH in 2009. The authors also touch on the movement’s evolution over seventeen years, including its 2020 rebranding from The Revelation Church of God to The Revelation Spiritual Home and current growing pains.
Among the book’s most illuminating insights—aside from TRSH’s cosmology, explored in Chapter 3—are the emic distinctions between “spirituality” and “religion.” For TRSH, spirituality is synonymous with “knowledge” and internality, while religion is dismissed as “belief” and externality. Since 2020, TRSH has vocally rejected labels such as “religion” and “church,” viewing them as Western impositions. This discursive maneuver is part of a larger decolonial strategy to legitimize TRSH’s place in Southern Africa’s spiritual economy.
Chapter 4 shifts gears to explore TRSH’s economic footprint. Based on interviews, the authors map a sprawling network of roughly seventy businesses—from fashion and food to health services, investment advice, youth sports, and even funeral insurance. Readers may be surprised to discover TRSH’s ties to South Korea’s McCol soft-drink enterprise (via the Federation for World Peace and Unification) and the Church of Scientology’s “Tools for Life” training programs. The authors cheekily dub this constellation “business ecumenism”—though they note it’s a pragmatic, one-off affair.
The final chapter turns to South Africa’s anti-cult activism, tracing its roots to French and other Western organizations and its broad net, which ensnares Pentecostal churches, NRMs, and AIS-inspired groups alike. This watchdog activity dates back to the 1990s and reflects a complex interplay of global anxieties and local politics.
In sum, this latest Element is a testament to the power of scholar-subject collaboration. Through inductive, fieldwork-driven inquiry, Introvigne and Šorytė offer rare primary data on a spiritually vibrant yet academically neglected corner of the religious landscape. The book reminds us that the study of new religious movements remains stubbornly Eurocentric, and that the global spiritual renaissance—especially in Africa—demands fresh eyes and sharper tools. For readers ready to rethink their categories and expand their horizons, this slim volume packs a revelatory punch.
Márk Nemes is a historian and a graduate in the academic study of religions. He is also a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Szeged’s PhD program and works as a researcher at the Hungarian Academy of Arts’ Research Institute of Art Theory and Methodology. As an awardee of the Hungarian National Eötvös Scholarship, he served as a visiting researcher at CESNUR from 2023 to 2024. For the past 10 years, he has focused on researching new, alternative, and emergent forms of religiosity in Hungary, Iceland, the US and most recently, in Italy.
